Jul. 27, 2013

If you’re a customer of Greater Cincinnati Water Works, your tap water is cutting-edge stuff.

The utility has invested $30 million in a project that treats water with ultraviolet light. It’s an effort 20 years in the making, sparked by a nasty outbreak of cryptosporidium in Milwaukee in 1993 that sickened more than 400,000 people and killed several dozen whose immune systems couldn’t handle the relentless diarrhea the outbreak unleashed.

Though such outbreaks are extremely rare, the Milwaukee event sparked years of research and testing among industry experts worldwide to find the best, most cost-efficient way to destroy parasites and bacteria that chemicals simply don’t touch. The answer embraced by most is ultraviolet light, a treatment that mimics the sun’s rays, but in a more concentrated and time-efficient fashion.

“Milwaukee’s was the biggest waterborne disease outbreak in the history of the United States,” said Bruce Whitteberry, assistant superintendent of the utility’s Water Quality & Treatment Division. “It got everybody thinking.”

It’s a proactive stance that could have raised eyebrows among the more cost-conscious, but Whitteberry said that officials helped pacify potential naysayers by installing solar panels to offset energy costs by as much as 30 percent and doing about $752,000 in pre-construction studies to help ensure “we only had to do this once because we did it the right way.”

The effort is earning applause from outsiders. “Municipalities often don’t fix their systems until pipes break and a massive sinkhole swallows the neighborhood – or you get a massive contaminate because the old system failed,” said Peter Gleick, a water-quality expert and co-founder and president of the Pacific Institute, an independent research group based in Oakland, Calif.

Final testing is still underway, but water already is being pumped through the 20,000-square-foot facility that’s now part of the Richard Miller Treatment Plant in California. Early test results have prompted some computer software tweaks, but so far the water itself has proved pristine, said CarelVandermeyden, the utility’s chief engineer.

The new facility can handle as much as 240 million gallons a day – though most days it disinfects just more than half that amount. The water goes through the same settling and granular-activated carbon treatment it has for years before being diverted into the new building, where it streams through one of eight 78-inch pipes outfitted in the center with five UV light bulbs bright enough to damage your eyes.

After that, chlorine and fluoride is added.

The utility serves 1.1 million customers spanning parts of Hamilton, Butler, Warren and Clermont counties in Southwest Ohio, and Boone County in Northern Kentucky. The Kellogg Avenue plant supplies about 88 percent of drinking water to customers. The Bolton Treatment Plant, which draws from 12 wells in the Great Miami Aquifer, supplies the rest.

While some plants incorporating UV light treatment have been able to reduce the amount of chemicals used elsewhere in the disinfection process, Water Works officials say they can’t cut down their chlorine use further because of water-quality regulations.

Overall, Cincinnati’s upgrade is on budget – and might actually end up costing about $28 million instead of the $30 million initially projected. Those savings were trimmed by $721,000 in overage blamed mostly on construction changes and weather delays, according to documents the utility released in response to a request filed by The Enquirer.

Construction costs rose from the original $20.2 million bid to more than $20.9 million, blamed on changes needed in part because of “unknown existing conditions.”

Costs are covered by the same bond sales that fund the utility’s improvements each year. The estimated $100,000 in ongoing operational costs will be covered by customers, whose rates rose by about 30 cents a month.

Gleick said it’s a reasonable increase. “Water is still one of our cheapest utilities, and one could argue it’s perhaps our most important,” he said. ⬛

I am your consumer watchdog, focusing on issues affecting you and your family. You can contact me at ahunt@enquirer.com